michael b. jordan

Black Panther is a massive, grandiose, deep film with tons to talk about and handles most of its ideas with quite a lot of grace. It is also about 45 minutes too short to give a lot of those ideas the time they need to be fully explored and okay I said it. There, you happy?

Unfortunately, it’s another in a long line of comedies that has guys behaving badly and treating girls like crap for the entire film and then lets them off the hook towards the end because that’s the structure of the typical romantic comedy — not because any of it makes any sense.

Any way you look at it, Grant’s shooting is an awful tragedy, and debates about the whether the amount of time served by the man who shot him was enough (11 months of a 2-year sentence) are completely warranted. Coogler’s intention, however, for this film is clear: to give voice and dignity to Oscar. This isn’t the story of two people and their chance trajectories ending in tragedy. It’s the story of the victim.

What makes ‘Chronicle’ different from every other superhero movie out there is that it’s presented as found footage, meaning it’s supposedly filmed by the teenagers, their friends, and existing security cameras.

‘Chronicle’ is a first-person, found footage take on the super hero genre, but it’s also a remarkably affecting teenage drama, as it unpacks familiar issues such as alienation, loneliness and the awkwardness that is inherent in almost every adolescence.